


Pressed

by PanicFOB



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 11:15:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20257189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanicFOB/pseuds/PanicFOB
Summary: In an attempt to improve the public opinion of Bucky joining the Avengers, Pepper suggests he do an interview for a press piece. Unfortunately, Bucky doesn't make the best first impression on the beautiful reporter. Or so he thinks.





	Pressed

**Author's Note:**

> Another piece I did on Tumblr for a writing challenge. Hope you enjoy this, and make sure to check out my other stories if you haven't yet :)

“Nice one!” Steve shouted at him over the loud music playing through the gym. Bucky had just landed a solid punch right in his friend’s gut with his metal arm. Steve Rogers was the only person Bucky knew who could look so happy and encouraging while getting the shit beat out of him.  
Steve swiped his leg around, trying to get Bucky on his back, but the trained soldier dodged it easily. “Stop worrying about how well I’m doing, Steve! You need to step up your game, old man!” Bucky went for an uppercut, barely managing to clip him in the jaw.  
“I’m the one training you, though!” Steve said, finally landing a punch in Bucky’s side.  
“And as I’ve told you, if you think I need you to train me in any sort of combat, you’ve lost your damn mind!”  
“Bucky, you’re a part of the team, now! You have to go through the standard training just like everybody else!”  
The dark-haired man launched a kick right into Steve’s left shoulder and was just about to tell his ‘Captain’ where he could shove his ‘standard training’ when the blaring music suddenly cut off.  
The pair of them continued to fight at each other for a moment before a voice Bucky recognized as Pepper’s said, “Bucky, Miss Y/L/N is here to interview you for that press piece we discussed.”  
He turned to look at Pepper, then, and the gorgeous woman standing next to her that Bucky presumed to be Miss Y/L/N. Steve took the opportunity to do another leg swipe, and Bucky hadn’t been expecting it this time. He was flat on his back in an instant.  
He grunted and looked at the reporter once again. “You’ve caught me at a really bad time, Miss Y/L/N.”  
“Please, call me Y/F/N. And I’m so sorry to be a bother Mister Barnes,” Bucky could tell she was being sarcastic, “but this is the time we scheduled the interview for.”  
He reluctantly pulled himself up off the mat.  
“It’s okay, Buck,” Steve said, looking quite smug, “I was getting tired of kicking your ass over and over again anyway.”  
Bucky didn’t even dignify his friend with a response. To the reporter, he said, “Just let me take a quick shower. I’ll meet you in the conference room.” She nodded her head in agreement, but Bucky could see the annoyance in her eyes.  
He headed to the locker room thinking about how he might take his sweet time. He had never wanted to do this press piece in the first place, but Pepper had insisted it was necessary. Despite the man being cleared of all criminal charges, his public image was still less than flattering, and many people were displeased with him joining the forces of the Avengers initiative. As a result, Pepper had sat him down last week and explained that the only way to boost the public’s perception of him was for him to open up about himself. She said he had to be ‘vulnerable,’ and Bucky was disgusted at the thought of it. He couldn’t imagine telling the reporter a damn thing about his inner thoughts and feelings.  
He spent an extra ten minutes conditioning his air and made sure to dry off in between each toe individually before getting dressed. His legs moved ever so slowly toward the conference room, and his shoulders sagged dramatically before he opened the door.  
“A quick shower?” She said immediately in a snarky tone.  
“I didn’t realize you were timing it,” Bucky quipped back.  
She raised her eyebrows at him. “Mister Barnes, the way I see this, I’m doing you a favor, not the other way around.”  
“It’s Bucky.”  
“Sorry?”  
“You said I should call you by your first name, so you should call me Bucky.” He finally sat down at the table.  
“Regardless, we don’t have to do this interview if you’re so firmly against it, but it’s your reputation on the line.” She looked at him questioningly, waiting for Bucky to decide what he would do.  
He wanted to end it right there, but he knew Pepper would kill him. And then Tony would kill him for upsetting Pepper. “All right, let’s just get it over with.”  
She nodded her head and turned on her recorder. “Let’s start with your childhood, Bucky. What was that like?”  
He shrugged. “About the same as anyone growing up during the depression. Not too bad, and things got a lot better once I met Steve. The two of us got up to a lot of trouble, but it was always in good fun.”  
“What did the two of you do together?”  
“Went to Coney Island every chance we got. Took dames dancing a lot. Well, I danced with ‘em. Steve just sort of stood around and moped.”  
“Was the dynamic between you and Steve difficult before he received the serum?”  
“No, furthest thing from it. I always knew what my role was as his friend before. I looked after him, helped him out of fights, and made sure he didn’t do anything stupid to get himself killed. Once he became Captain America, he didn’t need me for any of that any longer. That’s when the dynamic became difficult.”  
“Were you jealous of him when you first saw how he had changed?”  
“Nah, I was happy for him, proud that he wasn’t afraid to do whatever it took to be able to fight for what was right. But like I said, I didn’t really know my role as his friend anymore; I felt a bit lost.”  
“I’m sure he was quite the ladies’ man after his transformation. Did it make it difficult to get dates yourself with Captain America around?”  
Bucky snorted. “Sure they were clamoring at the looks of him, but once he opened his mouth everybody knew it was the same old Steve. He still couldn’t properly chat up a dame if his life depended on it. I had nothing to worry about when it came to getting dates.”  
Y/N was looking at him differently now, the annoyance gone and entertainment clear in her lovely eyes.  
“Did you ever fall in love with any of those dates, Bucky?”  
“Not for a lack of trying,” was all he said.  
She cleared her throat and continued, “Let’s move on to the more difficult stuff, shall we?”  
He didn’t respond, feeling closed off once again, concerned for what she might ask him about Hydra.  
“When you were imprisoned by Hydra and under constant mind control, what did you feel?”  
He looked at her blankly. “I don’t understand the question.”  
“Even though you could not speak or act in any way that was your own choice, I’m wondering what was going on in your head. Did you have any control over your thoughts and feelings?”  
He lowered his eyes to the desk, unable to meet hers as she waited for his answer. What could he tell her about that time? Sometimes it was such a blur he couldn’t sort any of it out; other times, it was crystal clear, haunting his every waking moment. There were certain feelings that always stood out to him the most though.  
“Guilt. Remorse. Disgust. Moral confliction.”  
“You feel those things now, or you remember feeling them at the time?”  
“At the time and now.” He scratched his nails over a nick in the wood table, anything to distract him from this unpleasant conversation. “Every waking moment, every step I took, every knife I held, every gun I fired were in perfect sync with those thoughts. My mind repeated them like a mantra over and over again: guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt.”  
“Why did you feel guilty, Bucky?”  
This question made him quite agitated. He finally flicked his steel-blue eyes up at her. “What do you mean, why? I was being forced to murder people, and I was so fucking weak that I couldn’t stop it. No matter how hard I fought their control, I always obeyed in the end.”  
“But you did stop it eventually, right? When you pulled your best friend from that river.”  
Bucky stood up, furious at this woman. “Yeah, seventy fucking years too late. I gruesomely killed people for seven fucking decades like Hydra’s good little soldier, and you want to give me a brownie for stopping myself from killing the one person from my past that I recognized.”  
“There’s no need to get angry, Bucky. I have to ask these questions in order to completely understand your thoughts on the situation.”  
“Here’s my thoughts: write that the Winter Soldier is a psycho who should be locked up because the public is right, I don’t deserve to be here,” he said loudly before exiting the conference room with a slam of the door. 

It took two whole days for Bucky to seriously regret how he had acted toward the reporter. Most days, Bucky was happy to be an Avenger, happy to prove himself as a good guy, a hero. Some days, though, Bucky was enveloped by the deepest and most intense self-loathing one could possibly imagine. The day Y/N had interviewed him had been one of those days. She had seen and heard the worst of him, and Bucky was sure she’d be writing it all down for the world to read within a week’s time.  
He wondered why Pepper hadn’t sought him out for a scolding yet. He was certain the reporter would have told Pepper about how their interview had ended, but Bucky considered that Pepper knew he had bad days every once in a while, so maybe she was choosing to forgive him for blowing up at a reporter.  
He recounted the whole fiasco to Steve the morning after it happened. His friend was understanding, but he did feel the need to reprimand Bucky, saying, “You know better than to speak to a lady that way, Buck.” He followed it up by slapping Bucky upside the head. And Steve was right: Bucky did know better. He felt immense regret and embarrassment over how he had acted, but the way he saw it, there was nothing to do over it now. He considered trying to speak to Y/N again, but he was sure she’d want nothing to do with him. He’d simply have to wait for the press piece to come out and accept his fate. 

A week later, Bucky walked into the kitchen with messy hair and a groggy look on his face, searching for tea and a bagel. He relaxed on a bar stool as his tea steeped and his bagel toasted, and just as he was about to rest his sleepy head on the counter, Steve slapped a newspaper down in front of him.  
“Have you seen it yet, Buck?”  
“I assume you’re talking about my press piece?”  
Steve confirmed it with a nod.  
Bucky groaned. “I really don’t want to read it.”  
“You should.”  
“Is it good or bad or terrible?” Bucky asked miserably.  
“It’s…. something,” Steve replied in a vague manner.  
Bucky dragged himself off the barstool, grabbed his mug and bagel, along with the newspaper, and returned to his room to read the daunting story in private. He braced himself for the worst, and only a few sentences in, he nearly choked on his bagel in surprise. 

What can one expect when encountering James Buchanan Barnes, also known as the Winter Soldier? Just as most other war veterans, victims of imprisonment, torture, experimentation, and mind control, Bucky Barnes has his good days and bad days. He struggles to overcome the hardships he has been put through, and sometimes the traumatic memories consume him. However, Bucky Barnes is not made of bad days. One can tell just from looking at him, and occasionally catching a playful smile, that Bucky lives for the good days, and when he’s at his good, it’s grand, stupendous even. He lives for being a loyal friend and teammate to each and every one of the Avengers. He lives for saving a thousand times as many lives as he was forced by Hydra to take. He lives for happiness in simple moments, like ragging on his best pal Steve Rogers for being a dunce when talking to a pretty woman. He lives for theme parks and dancing and family. There is much more to the Winter Soldier than brooding and regret, although he does feel constant remorse for his years under mind control. The man that sat before me in our interview was not James Barnes of the Howling Commandos, nor was he an obedient soldier. He was someone else entirely: a man that has gone through hell, not due to any mistake of his own, and survived it, that has become stronger in both the mental and physical sense and grew into an exemplary human being. Bucky Barnes deserves to be loved by the public just as much as Iron Man or Captain America. 

The article went on to give a more factual account of Bucky’s life, which he didn’t bother to read. He finished up his breakfast and threw on the first clothes he could find. He grasped the newspaper tightly in his metal hand as he left his room, exited the compound, and drove to the newspaper office. By the time he was marching up to Y/N’s desk, the paper was completely crumpled.  
“Did Pepper tell you to write all this?” he demanded of her.  
“Of course not. I write what I want to write. Nobody feeds me words.”  
“Then how the hell, after that terrible interview we had,” Bucky had to pause for a moment as he had almost choked up with tears creeping into his eyes, “did you come up with something so kind to say about me?”  
She looked at him so adorningly, and Bucky searched for pity in her brilliant eyes, but he couldn’t find any. “It’s just as you said, Bucky,” she answered him gently, “I caught you at a really bad time, but I could hear, in-between all your harsh words, what you would have been like if I’d caught you at a good time. I’m great at reading people, and I know the only person you loathe and disrespect is yourself. The only person that hates the Winter Soldier more than the public is you. I can see all that right there in your stunning blue eyes, Bucky. I wanted to tell the public about all the good I see in you.”  
He looked away from her because a tear had finally shed, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.  
“Thank you,” he whispered, for it was all he could muster.  
She offered him a seat to collect himself. He eventually became more composed and found the nerve to say, “Used to, it was the men who wrote poetry to the dames they were tryin’ to win over, not the other way around.”  
“Is that what you think I was doing? Writing you love sonnets?” But she wore a playful smirk, so Bucky knew he couldn’t be too off base.  
“Would you wanna join me for dinner tonight so you can see for yourself what I’m like at my good times?” His face was hopeful, charm etching across his cheekbones and up into his crinkled eyes.  
She giggled at his daring question. “I’d love that, Bucky.”


End file.
